


the future from a winter moon

by Keturagh



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Accidental Drug Use, Cuddling & Snuggling, Developing Relationship, Dorian Pavus is a Good Friend, Drug Use, F/M, Fluff, Recreational Drug Use, Satinalia (Dragon Age), Tarot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:09:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21996541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: No one recognizes her as they weave around skirts, overlarge masks, and the stalls of costumed vendors hawking sizzling meats and battered berries piked on sticks. It is nice to not be recognized. She does not know why this is happening to her right now, but it is good. It is like she is dreaming. It is like she is not the leader of the Inquisition. It is nice to walk like this and to be following her body from just over her own left shoulder.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel/Female Lavellan, Fen'Harel/Inquisitor, Lavellan/Solas (Dragon Age), Solasmance - Relationship, solavellan - Relationship
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	the future from a winter moon

**“Or sing about the golden bird that summoned the future from a winter moon.” (Wax Cross, Tin Can Forest)**

\--

Gold flashes in the corner of her eye. She flinches reflexively, stumbling away from the gleam, and the clown sees this and cavorts back her way. She’s already shaking her head as he sidles up to her shoulder, voicing a theatrical _“Ah, beautiful!”_ The stink of liquor ripples from his mouth and she covers her nose, leaning back.

“So _shy_!” He sings out, his whole body glittering with gilded gleam.

She feels a little sick.

“Come off,” Dorian intervenes with a finality that even the clown can heed. The tumbler bows, grabs his codpiece suggestively in Dorian’s direction, and then cackles away into the night and the press of the crowd. Dorian holds her shoulder, is speaking to her. She struggles to surface from the cloud of combined root and liquor stifling her awareness.

“Thanks. I have no idea why he —” she waves in the direction that the clown emerged from: a brightly-baubled tavern open to the night, the lanterns strung along its windows reflecting in the water below.

“Who can guess why anyone is anywhere doing anything in this mess.” Dorian ducks under her arm and they continue down the boardwalk in southern Val Royeaux, he maneuvering her through the revelry of Satinalia.

“Not enjoying yourself?” She feels like the top of her head is trying to pull away from her ears.

“Not nearly as much as you clearly are, dear thing.”

Her head shakes but then she realizes her eyes are closed.

“No. No, I’m walking.”

He makes a sound of pure exasperation underneath her right arm.

“What you are currently managing hardly qualifies, and I am in a fine position to judge.”

No one recognizes her as they weave around skirts, overlarge masks, and the stalls of costumed vendors hawking sizzling meats and battered berries piked on sticks. It is nice to not be recognized. She does not know why this is happening to her right now, but it is good. It is like she is dreaming. It is like she is not the leader of the Inquisition. It is nice to walk like this and to be following her body from just over her own left shoulder.

After a long time, too long, where she just watches the passing velvet and lace, the glimmering jewels and fascinating, plunging necklines that have usurped those ridiculous collars for this occasion - she thinks to ask, “Where are we going?”

Dorian pulls her out of the path of a back-flipping dragon missing one of his shoes and belching fire.

“I am depositing you with your keeper, and then _I_ am going, alone, to enjoy literally one moment of this mad excuse for a festival.”

“My Keeper?” She laughs, thinking of Deshanna lecturing these shems. Grown Orlesian noblemen sitting cross-legged in the dirt as Deshanna lashes their ears with stories of Falon’Din wandering the edges of the Void, his owls waiting for bad children to show disrespect. Falon’Din would hear the reports from his messengers and would summon the spirits of their great-great-grandparents to admonish them from the Beyond if they did not honor their elders. “They would cry,” she concedes to Dorian, who just looks over at her, snorts, and looks away.

They reach the end of the brightly-lit boardwalk and come to a part of the dock that has few lanterns, few revelers. The crowd has been left behind; few vendors, and unpopular ones, dot this end of Val Royeaux’s dead waters.

Dorian heaves a long-suffering sigh and sits her down on the edge of the dock, her legs dangling over the water glistening under the moons. “This one is yours,” he says, flatly, and then he is gone and she opens her eyes and realizes she had forgotten to open them for a very long time.

Solas looks down at her, one corner of his lips twitching up in the way that they do when he is trying not to smile.

She reaches up. Holds his cheek. “You should let me see,” she says.

He does smile then, but it seems a different sort of amused. He presses a palm to her forehead.

“Of what did you partake?” He says, though he doesn’t seem particularly concerned that she answer. And she does not, closing her eyes again under his warm, broad hand.

“Happy Satinalia,” she answers. “We do not celebrate this shem fuckery.”

He laughs, his breaths catching in that funny little way.

“No?”

“No. But I saw someone give an impoverished child a mooncake, so I guess one good thing came of today.”

“That was you. I was there. Don’t you recall?”

“Oh. No. That was me?” This genuinely disturbs her for a moment — both that she has seen him earlier this night, and that she remembers watching someone else, someone dressed in a simple gown sewn of cotton and fennec fur with a mask of etched moon phases doing something that apparently, she did as well. “Solas, there must be so many mooncakes.”

He only chuckles softly. He is sitting, hands pressed together between his knees, legs hanging off over the water. She has been rotated, it seems, so that she is flat on her back along the edge of the dock. There are boats out on the water, all of them drifting far away from them, closer to Val Royeaux proper.

She turns her head to the side and sees the mask that she remembers from her — dream? No, that was a memory, something she saw someone do — next to her on the boardwalk.

“Oh.”

Something makes a loud, crackling sound in the night. The moons are so bright.

“Why aren’t I cold?”

“Likely the intoxication. Equally likely, the fire sigil you warped down before Dorian helped you sit. I believe your exact words were, ‘Wood is cold, don’t tell me what wood is, I know cold when I see it.’”

She blinks, slowly. Turns her head to look up at him again, meeting his eyes very carefully.

“Solas. Is the dock on fire?”

He answers very seriously. “No, vhenan. The dock is not on fire.”

Uncertain if he is deceiving her or if he is a Desire demon telling her what she wants to hear, she rolls onto all fours and inspects the dock, vigilant, for signs of smoldering.

And then arms are wrapped around her and Solas is pulling her over his lap. She protests, moaning to be released, but he holds her firmly, even bouncing her like an errant child upon his knee. “Hush, da’len,” he soothes, which is outrageous and unacceptable. “Hush.”

The lapping of the water below them crinkles through the night. Peals of laughter reach them softly through the winter air; the lights of the boardwalk string up against the sky over Solas’ shoulder. She watches the costumed figures ghosting about one another, their merriment taking on the eerie echo of halla cavorting between trees, movement like a familiar dance she does not want to recognize here, so far from home. She presses her cheek into the warmth of the pelt he’s slung over one shoulder, the fur tickling up her nose.

“I’m not a child,” she says.

“No,” he agrees, though he continues to hold her. The crackling sound rips out again, the noise much closer this time, and she jumps. “Sorry,” he says, lightly, and holds the pack of cards up where she can see. “Old habit.”

“What were you doing?”

He performs the trick for her while she rests in his arms, holding his hands out side to side and fanning the deck from one hand to the other. He presses a kiss to her forehead. “Don’t tell Blackwall.”

She laughs, shakes her head. “Never.” Then, “Here, let me read you.” And before he can say a word she’s plucked a card from the deck and is holding it up to the moonlight.

“Gold of Angels. We call this one Gilded Death.”

He stiffens beneath her and it occurs to her that he is likely unfamiliar with the game — he has spent so little time among the clans.

“It is a good card,” she says mollifyingly. “It is a card of change. Of journeys and new life, reworking and finding paths beyond what a person already knows. It usually means that something is going to change. Something drastic — something will never be the same.” He doesn’t say anything, only his arms wrap around her tighter. She leans into his embrace, arm out and holding the card over the water, letting the gold leaf on the figure’s wings catch the shine of the moons.

Then, impulsively, she flicks the card away. Out into the dark, carried a short way by a breeze over the dead lake. She watches the card flutter, gold leaf shimmering like eyes in the night, and she looks away before it lands upon the water and sinks below the waves.


End file.
